Controling My Anger

Last winter, the psychiatrist and I talked a lot about anger. We also talked a lot about my family and the things that made me anxious and mad. It's easy to replay our conversations, and I sometimes do that whether I want to or not. I wonder if everyone can see their lives like films replaying in their minds.

"We have been talking about your parents splitting up," the psychiatrist is saying to me. "Was it hard for you to adjust once your father left?"

"Yes," I say. "My father was the third person in our family, and without him, there were only two. It was hard to get used to that. Two is the smallest kind of family and I wanted back into the bigger one."

"I get the picture," says the doctor. Her name is Dr. Salmon but I do not like calling her that. She once told me I could call her Dr. S., but I do not like calling her that either.

I look around her office and I do not know what picture she is talking about. Her walls are beige and bare except for a petit-point wall-hanging of a horse and its colt, and a framed picture of words with a blue-and-red crest at the top. I'm still not sure what she means about the picture but I don't remark on it. My mother has warned me that doctors aren't supposed to be interrogated, and I am trying not to interrogate this one. I also try not to look at her bookshelves. They are yellow.

"What bothered you the most about your father being gone?" she asks.

"The medicine cabinet," I say.

"The medicine cabinet?"

"You are just like the queen," I tell her.

"The queen?"

"The queen knows the way to keep a conversation going by repeating a few words of what the other person says. The queen knows how to do it. When she repeats a few words, the person knows that she is listening and keeps talking. Shauna taught me that."

"Shauna taught you that?"

"You are doing it again. Repeating the words. Shauna was the teacher associate who worked with me in school. She taught me a lot of things, like how to do a conversation and how to use the five w's in order to ask questions. She is married now and living in Edmonton but she and her husband are moving back to Saskatoon at the end of May. She has invited me to visit her when they get here."

"Taylor, what did you mean when you said the medicine cabinet was the thing that bothered you most about your dad's leaving?"

"His shelf was empty," I say. "And when one thing changes, everything changes. When I would get up in the morning and go into the bathroom to brush my teeth, I'd see that shelf and then I couldn't eat breakfast. Because I couldn't eat, my mother would send extra snacks to school with me, and the other kids would steal them. This made me so mad that I could not sit at my desk because it was near their desks, where they had hidden the food that they took from me, but it was not appropriate for me to look inside their desks, even if my food was in there."

I remember that time at school as if it were yesterday. It was not a happy time. Instead of sitting in my desk I would go and sit in an empty box that the teacher had left in the back of the classroom. It was because of my preference for sitting in the box and the yelling I often made in there that my teacher asked the school psychologist to come and see me. He referred me to a family psychologist, who prescribed medication. The medication made me feel outside of my own self in a bad way. I've heard that a lot of medications prescribed for children have never been tested on children. You can't be sure something is safe if it's never been tested. I felt somehow disengaged from my body.

I spent the rest of that year, and the next two years, unhappy and not wanting to go to school. For part of a school year I spent time in a class for kids with intellectual disabilities, where all the work was easy. Someone gave me play-dough to keep inside my desk, and to squeeze whenever I felt like it. I remember eating it, which might have been an effect of the drugs.

When I was in grade five, I had an appointment with a specialist who diagnosed me with autism, but my mother didn't tell me this until I was in grade six and back in a regular class. I think the school knew about my diagnosis because they let a woman called Janet help me with my work. That was a relief, except we spent a lot of time outside the classroom in a little room and I don't think I learned very much. I did a lot of coloring.

When I started grade six, I was introduced to Shauna—a new teacher associate assigned to help me translate emotions, which the specialist said my brain had difficulty handling. That's when my mother told me that my brain was different from most people's brains, and it was because of something called Asperger's Syndrome. Later, she asked me if I had told any of my classmates I had that. "No," I said. I mean, who would tell people about their ass burgers?

Shauna, the teacher associate, had me look at picture cards of people's faces, and we talked about the way the people were feeling. I learned to put a name to these emotions, and then, later, to my own. Once the emotions were labeled, I learned strategies to deal with them. When I was angry, I could take a break or ask for help. The school stopped sending me home because Shauna told them that this just taught me to melt down when I wanted to go home. I still had meltdowns from time to time but now there was a safe place I could go to relax, a little room off the supply room. Shauna said the meltdowns were caused by my emotions short-circuiting, and she told me to go to the little room before I melted down, as a preventative action. I wish there were little rooms like that everywhere. Now that I am nineteen I have other strategies when I get angry. It's just hard sometimes to use them.

In class, I still found it challenging to figure out what the teacher was saying if she was giving directions, but Shauna would sit with me and review what I was to do, and provide an example which I could follow. I started getting good marks on my report cards. And I stopped taking those drugs. Instead of taking the drugs, an occupational therapist told me to take walks around the school if I got agitated, which was about four or five times a day. At recess I ran around the track, and I ran again in gym class because I have an impossible time coordinating my body for sports so it was too hard for me to join in with basketball or volleyball.

To help me stay focused while I was sitting at my desk, I could chew gum whenever I wanted and I could drink water from a bottle with a straw to calm myself. Shauna told me that when I was in trouble, I just needed to think of a strategy. "Stop and think," she'd say. "What do you want to do to help yourself?"

I told all this to the psychiatrist last winter and she kept asking questions. She wanted to know if running made me feel calm. I told her that running does not make me feel calm if I am being chased by something, like a big dog. Or if I am in a contest chasing something, like a calf with a bow on its tail that I am supposed to pull off if I want to win a prize. It does make me feel calm if I am running for no reason, and afterward, when I sit down, I just listen to my breath and have no thoughts in my head.

The doctor taught me a couple of other calming strategies, such as deep pressure to the earlobes and a visualizing technique, where I learned to acknowledge my anger and then send it from my core down to the soles of my feet, where it's easier to manage. And she advised me to keep running on a regular basis, to take some of the stress out of my daily life.

"Could running take the stress out without taking anything else out?" I asked the doctor.

"Maybe you could try it and see," she said. And her mouth curved up. I think she was smiling.

Running might be a good strategy to deal with stress, but I don't think that running can help me now. Especially not running away.